Davisville

This week’s subject is narrow, but contains a question worth considering. It involves one of the ways that ideas emerge and ultimately shape public life in Davis. This specific path involves the Davis citizen commissions that advise the City Council on subjects including city spending, planning, police accountability, and several other areas.

A commission can take up a topic for various reasons, including if the council asks it to, if city staff needs it to, and on its own volition. The third option might be changing. This year the council will decide if a commission should get prior approval from its council liaison (or a council subcommittee) before putting an item on the commission’s agenda.

Why make this change, what’s good about it, what isn’t? Today on Davisville we hear from two proponents — Mayor Josh Chapman and Vice Mayor Bapu Vaitla, who form the council’s subcommittee on commissions — and Elaine Roberts Musser and Dan Carson, two of the change’s leading critics.

Each weeknight at 9, people gather in Central Park near 4th and C streets, some to receive surplus food, some to hand it out. This is the Davis Night Market (pictured), a small-budget volunteer venture created in 2019 to feed people and reduce food waste. We talked with two of its co-founders in January 2020, and the market has since grown to five nights a week. “The food is kind of the carrot to get people in. It’s more about the community,” adds Max Morgan, a volunteer since 2019. "People are in desperate need of community, as much as they need food.”

“We really have only one rule: take what you can eat,” says Joanna Sodke, a volunteer for nearly a year. “Anyone can come here and take food.” (There are limits on pizza, she says, “a very hot item.”) Donors include well-known food purveyors in Davis, plus people with extra produce from their trees and gardens. The market operates with a county permit. Sometimes a volunteer will need to talk a person through a difficult moment. Today on Davisville, Joanna and Max talk about how it all works, including why they meet at night.

Emese Parker (pictured), an author and certified nurse practitioner specializing in women's health, began offering Davis Women's Circles this summer. Each has a theme -- one session focused on the perfect mom myth vs. the good-enough mother, and others include the mental load of mothering, rage and guilt, plus "some fun topics coming up this fall." The circles are for mothers, or soon-to-be mothers, of all ages and stages of life. Today on Davisville she explains how they work and why she's offering them in Davis.

The U.S. Surgeon General recently warned that parenting today is too hard and stressful because parents face expectations that they should spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children, driven partly by fears that if they don’t, their kids could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.

Today we also talk about matrescence, a play on the term adolescence, or the “massive identity shift and transformation that affects all that she is.” “If we understand that it is a becoming process," Parker says, "then we can have real conversations about what parenting and motherhood is like. We don’t have to just smile and say 'oh yeah, everything is just fine.' We can actually have real conversations with each other and talk about what we’re enjoying, and what parts are harder than expected."

Davis has two local tax measures on the ballot this fall and today we talk about the one for the library, Measure T. (We looked at the other one, sales tax increase Measure Q, last month.) Measure T would raise about $1.1 million a year to pay for operations at what will eventually be Davis’ two public libraries — the existing one in north central Davis, and the new one in south Davis due to open in 2026.

Measure T would raise an existing property tax by about $49 per house or $24.50 per apartment, to $172 or $86 respectively per year. Today on Davisville we talk with Jim Provenza, a Davis member of the county Board of Supervisors, and Katie Caceres, a student at the University of California at Davis and an intern in Provenza’s office. They’re both part of the campaign. We talk about what the money would buy, how the county calculated the amount needed, libraries as town squares for speech and information, and how people use libraries as print gives way to digital.